Commentary: Reading classic offers insight into political landscape

I started my summer reading with Emily Wilson’s recent translation of “The Iliad.” I enjoyed her version of “The Odyssey” a few years ago and needed the kind of escape from the news that I knew Homer could provide.

Who needs a beach read on the eve of the political apocalypse when you can enjoy an ancient epic about a brutal war leading to the collapse of an illustrious civilization?

Maybe you can relate to my mood: I want this election season over with. I have no more outrage left to give, yet there seems to be no bottom to Donald J. Trump’s authoritarian shamelessness. The debate between President Joe Biden and Trump had me ducking for cover. How the hell can we be in the same perilous position we were in four years ago?

I’m a progressive Democrat. I have family members who are hardcore Catholic Republicans. We don’t talk that much, and when we do it’s almost never about politics. Our worldviews are worlds apart, but I know they’re feeling as full of despair as I am about the state of the country.

But that’s where the similarities end. We’re at an ideological stalemate, where further debate can only devolve into bitter recrimination. I don’t know how to bridge these divides or stand up for what I believe in without sounding condemnatory. It’s hard to listen with an open mind when you’re convinced that the other person is an arsonist trying to torch your house.

Yes, I admit I’m angry. I’m angry at the way Donald Trump is waging war against American democracy and the rule of law. But I’m personally affronted that I have blood relatives who are sticking with a twice-impeached, many times indicted, convicted felon, who just so happens to have been found liable for sexual abuse.

My frustration is compounded by disillusionment. I thought we were rational animals, capable of collective reason. I thought when it mattered most we could put aside our tribal hatreds and protect our constitutional democracy from the depredations of a would-be strongman.

Homer is helping me understand the extent of my naivety. “The Iliad” is a poem about the clash of civilizations, but it is also a song of ruinous personal anger. The epic begins with an invocation to the muse, and Wilson vividly summons the animus fueling the tale: “Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath/of great Achilles, son of Peleus,/which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain/ and sent so many noble souls of heroes/to Hades and made men the spoils of dogs …”

If there’s any doubt that politics is a human sport, swayed by the most primitive of emotions, Homer squelches this innocence in the crib.

Wilson’s translation of “The Iliad” may not have the rocky grandeur of Richmond Lattimore’s English version, the lyrical exaltation of Robert Fitzgerald’s or the fluid gravitas of Robert Fagles’. But the modern accessibility of Wilson’s language brings the battlefield drama back down to blood-caked earth.

Warrior values, like courage and loyalty, are still nobly on display, but the slaughter has a maniacal quality. These glorified military heroes are killing machines. In the blunt-force way Wilson depicts the human wreckage, she delivers a blistering critique of patriarchal madness.

Without editorializing, Wilson never lets the reader forget that all of this carnage has a morally dubious pretext. Paris running off with Menelaus’ trophy wife, Helen, may have constituted a profound violation of the sacred duty of hospitality, but it’s also just another instance of men behaving abominably.

At the start of “The Iliad,” more than nine years into the war, morale among the Greeks is being tested by another flare-up of male ego. Achilles, enraged that Agamemnon has stolen his war-prize concubine, vows to hang up his armor. Later, when Hector leads the Trojan onslaught and Greek soldiers are dying like flies, Achilles refuses to budge from his aggrieved position. It will take the death of his beloved companion Patroclus for him to rejoin the battle.

Men bring calamity onto themselves with their fragile egos. Great feats of bravery are then required to stop the widespread havoc they themselves have wrought.

Helen, no paragon of rectitude, can’t resist Paris’ beauty even as she sees through to the deficiencies of his character. As she tells Hector, “This man has no good sense, no self-control,/and no capacity to change.” Hector doesn’t need to be reminded of his brother’s frailties. He has already had to viciously reproach Paris for standing back in the heat of battle: “Pathetic Paris! Womanizer! Cheat!/You are the very best at looking pretty./ Oh how I wish that you had never lived /or died unmarried.”

Yet for all of Hector’s nobility and valor, he is no more inclined than his Greek counterparts to put aside personal pride for a diplomatic solution that would spare countless lives. Heroism by no means signals moral perfection.

The gods, of course, are abetting the worst impulses of these mortals. Zeus and his motley crew of immortals are as petty, territorial and devious as their human underlings. Nowhere in the cosmos of “The Iliad” does reason reign unchecked, though as destiny tragically unfolds, human actions are judged and recorded for posterity.

A political troublemaker like Marjorie Taylor Greene might not seem to have any place in the Homeric universe, though the insolent congresswoman could be a descendant of Thersites, the “foul-mouthed” Greek soldier, who “knew how to blather on for hours/ with pointless and irrelevant complaints/against the rulers—anything he thought/might raise a laugh among the other Greeks.” Thersites is legitimately furious at the way the war is being handled by Agamemnon. But when Odysseus brutally puts him in his place, the troops are grateful to see “the rude windbag” finally silenced.

There’s precedent in Homer for even the most egregious MAGA shenanigans. No wonder Sigmund Freud was drawn to this treasury of human nature. The cornerstone of his theory of psychoanalysis is that our behavior is not completely under conscious control, that we are to a large extent at the mercy of impulses, emotions and memories beyond our immediate awareness and that the better angels of our nature have a mighty battle on their hands against our instinctual drives.

In “Civilization and its Discontents,” Freud takes a grim look at how the psychological makeup of mankind works against its own flourishing. Aggression and self-destruction, as Homer indelibly illustrated, are inextricably part of the human equation.

Sublimation of instinct, a prerequisite for civilization, is a recipe for conflict. We find security in the collective, but we balk if our freedom is unduly compromised.